CHANGE VISUALIZATIONS IN BUSINESS PROCESSES

Requirements Analysis

Simone Kriglstein and Stefanie Rinderle-Ma

University of Vienna, Faculty of Computer Science, Vienna, Austria

Keywords:

Change Visualization, Visualization Requirements.

Abstract:

Many business processes are highly dynamic, because process changes result from unplanned events and

exceptions which are unforeseen (e.g., demands of customers have changed, new legislature or design errors

are detected). The management of the large collections of the different process model versions which evolve

over time requires visualization approaches. Visualizations of changes between different process versions are

often essential, because processes in combination with change information can become very complex. In this

paper we discuss visualization requirements for process changes with the focus to support users to understand

changes more easily. The requirements analysis is based on insights which we gained from: (1) literature

review to get an overview about different characteristics of changes in process as well as existing visualization

approaches and (2) a user survey to identify users’ experiences and expectations in this ﬁeld. With the proposed

requirements we want to support researchers to identify directions for further work in regard to process change

visualization.

1 INTRODUCTION

Managing large collections of business process mod-

els plays an important role for any organization, be-

cause organizations tend to collect hundreds or even

thousands of business process models over time. One

reason for this proliferation of process models is that

they evolve over time in order to, for example, re-

act on changing environmental conditions (Rinderle

et al., 2004). Fast changing business environment re-

quires ﬂexible approaches to support companies to

adjust their business processes in regard to dynamic

structural changes. The need of ﬂexibility of pro-

cesses can be found in many applications. For exam-

ple in health care it is necessary to coordinate and plan

tasks but it is not convenient as well as cost effective

to deﬁne all possible task sequences in advance (Re-

ichert and Dadam, 1998). Unplanned events or excep-

tions can occur and therefore ﬂexibility in processes

is necessary to allow ad-hoc deviations from the pre-

planned processes (Reichert and Dadam, 1998).

Especially for critical and sensitive situations

and/or domains (e.g., health care) users are involved

in order to resolve exceptions or to deal with un-

planned events. Therefore it is absolutely essential

that users get a quick overview about their tasks and

to understand the logic behind a process and to comp-

rehend possible effects/consequences if changes of

the process model or process instances are neces-

sary (Rinderle et al., 2006). Based on the best known

saying ”a picture is worth a thousand words”, words

are often not sufﬁcient (e.g., especially to describe re-

lationships of processes or to analyze change log ﬁles

only in textual form). Visualizations help users to see

the unseen, because visual representations make pat-

terns transparent and provide a deeper understanding

of subjects (West et al., 2006). Moreover, visualiza-

tions of change information for processes allow users

to generate insights, which can inﬂuence their further

decisions (e.g., users can detect conﬂicts) and help

to make the structure and dependencies between ele-

ments in processes more transparent. Several research

studies have been conducted to analyze how visual-

ization techniques can help users to understand pro-

cesses and there exist several tools that offer process

visualization approaches to support users to model

and monitor business process models and instance

data (Matkovi

c et al., 2002; Aguilar-Sav

en, 2004;

Bobrik et al., 2006). Business processes often de-

scribe with the help of business process modeling no-

tations (e.g., see (Aguilar-Sav

en, 2004; Lu and Sadiq,

2007; Rajabi and Lee, 2010) which describes process

as a graphical representation (e.g., UML, Petri nets,

BPMN) to reﬂect the process logic.

584

Kriglstein S. and Rinderle-Ma S..

CHANGE VISUALIZATIONS IN BUSINESS PROCESSES - Requirements Analysis.

DOI: 10.5220/0003815505840593

In Proceedings of the International Conference on Computer Graphics Theory and Applications (IVAPP-2012), pages 584-593

ISBN: 978-989-8565-02-0

 2012 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)

Figure 1: Framework for visualizing change information.

However, process visualizations are often ill-

suited to deal with change information, because they

concentrate more or less on an idealized version of the

preferred process while ignoring graphical support to

highlight changes and human activities at design time

and at run time according to business process life cy-

cle. For an effective usage of such visualizations it is

necessary to ﬁnd a user-friendly design which allows

users to track the changes in business process mod-

els and instances. For example, a visualization (e.g.,

graphical representation of change log ﬁles) can be

helpful to monitor the changes and can support users

in their decision if a redesign of the process model

would be necessary.

Based on the challenge to select an appropriate vi-

sualization, it is useful to know the requirements and

expectations of such change visualizations. In this

paper we want to give researchers a ﬁrst overview

of different characteristics of changes and visualiza-

tion approaches in combination with a survey to iden-

tify users’ experiences and expectations. The pa-

per should support researchers to identify directions

for further work to bring forward the process change

visualizations. Moreover, we discuss requirements

for process change visualization which can be used

as foundation for designing change visualizations for

process models which meet users’ expectations.

This paper is structured as follows. In Section

2, the basic considerations for the visualization of

changes in processes are presented. The methodology

used in this work is discussed in Section 3. Moreover,

we give an overview about different characteristics of

process changes and visualization approaches in Sec-

tion 4. In Section 5 we discuss the ﬁndings of the

survey to identify users’ expectations and experiences

with graphical representation of change visualization.

Based on the gained insights from the literature re-

view and user survey, we identify requirements which

are relevant for the process change visualizations in

Section 6. Finally, the paper is concluded and gives

an outlook on future work in Section 7.

2 BASIC CONSIDERATIONS

Fast changing business environments require visual-

ization approaches to support companies in adjust-

ing their business processes in regard to changes. To

make this change information between different ver-

sions transparent it is necessary to identify ﬁrst how

the process models have changed as depicted in Fig-

ure 1. The information can range from the identi-

ﬁcation of the reason for the process changes (e.g.,

demands of customers have changed or detected de-

sign errors) to the speciﬁcation how the control and

data ﬂow of processes has changed (e.g., by adding

or deleting process elements). The next step is to

visualize the change information. Different visual-

ization approaches exist (e.g., dynamic representa-

tion of changes can be used for tracking changes be-

tween different versions) to enable users to compre-

hend changes more easily and to generate insights,

which can inﬂuence their further decisions (e.g., users

can detect conﬂicts). Users can inﬂuence both steps

(identiﬁcation of change information and their visu-

alization) depending which kind of information they

want to see and how this kind of change information

should be visualized. The choice of the visualization

approach and which change information should be

visualized often depends on users’ experiences with

other visualization tools and which expectations they

have on such visualizations.

3 METHODOLOGY

For the development of change visualizations it is im-

portant to identify visualization requirements with re-

spect to users’ expectations and experiences on such

CHANGE VISUALIZATIONS IN BUSINESS PROCESSES - Requirements Analysis

585

change visualizations. However, identiﬁcation of re-

quirements is not an easy task. Therefore we decided

to ﬁnd answers to the following questions: (1) What

are the characteristics of changes in processes?, (2)

Which visualization approaches do already exist?, (3)

Which experiences do users have with process visu-

alizations? and (4) Which expectations do users have

on the visualization of changes in processes?

To explore the ﬁrst and second question a litera-

ture review is used to get an overview about the differ-

ent characteristics of changes in processes and visual-

ization approaches. Literature review is often used

in the early beginning of the development process to

get relevant basic background information (e.g., by

searching traditional literature databases). Often liter-

ature review is combined with user surveys to contact

speciﬁc experts in this ﬁeld to obtain additional in-

sights. Therefore, the third and fourth question are

answered by the ﬁndings of a user survey to iden-

tify users’ expectations and experiences with graphi-

cal representations of processes and changes. For this

reason, we used online questionnaires to obtain qual-

itative and quantitative data.

4 LITERATURE REVIEW

The literature review should give researches a ﬁrst

overview about different visualization approaches and

different characteristics of changes. For the litera-

ture review databases – like IEEE Computer Society,

ACM Digital Library, Sciencedirect, and Springer-

Link – were searched.

4.1 Characteristics of Changes

Changes in business processes (which are usually

changes in data sets) result from (1) incomplete spec-

iﬁcations because events cannot always be predeﬁned

and (2) modiﬁcations which are based on new or

changed conditions (van der Aalst and Jablonski,

2000; Rajabi and Lee, 2010). Several works (e.g.,

see (van der Aalst and Jablonski, 2000; Kettinger

et al., 1997; Rajabi and Lee, 2010; Nurcan and Bar-

rios, 2003; Reichert and Dadam, 1998; van der Aalst,

2001)) exist which concentrate on the speciﬁcation

and criteria of process changes:

• Reasons for Changes. Different factors exist

which inﬂuence process changes, e.g.: (1) if the

context or the environment is changed (e.g., new

products or demands of customers have changed),

or (2) if a new legislature or new technology ex-

ists, or (3) if design errors or missing data sets are

detected (van der Aalst and Jablonski, 2000; Nur-

can, 2008; W

orzberger et al., 2008; Nurcan and

Barrios, 2003).

• Ad-hoc vs. Evolutionary. Literature distin-

guishes between ad-hoc changes and evolution-

ary changes (Schonenberg et al., 2008; Reichert

and Dadam, 1998; Nurcan, 2008; van der Aalst,

2001; van der Aalst and Jablonski, 2000; Rajabi

and Lee, 2010). Ad-hoc changes are only relevant

for one or more selected process instances if the

process deﬁnition is unsatisfying for the process

execution or to handle rare events. Such changes

have to be undone before any further instances is

allowed to start. Evolutionary changes are modi-

ﬁcations of the process model that are relevant for

all instances (e.g., to correct a design error) and

therefore migrating strategies are necessary for al-

ready running process instances.

• Entry Time vs. On-the-Fly. There exist two pos-

sible moments to integrate process changes: (1)

entry time means that changes can be performed

only before or at the moment the process instance

is created and (2) on-the-ﬂy means that changes

can be performed at any time (Schonenberg et al.,

2008; van der Aalst, 2001; Reichert and Dadam,

1998). This can have an impact on running as well

as new process instances. It must be generated

that such changes do not have a negative impact

on run time performance and do not disturb pro-

cess participants who are not involved.

• Change Patterns. Both for ad-hoc and evolu-

tionary changes, change patterns exist that spec-

ify how control and data ﬂow of processes can

be changed (Reichert and Dadam, 1998; van der

Aalst, 2001; Weber et al., 2008; W

orzberger et al.,

2008).

4.2 Visualization Approaches

Business processes are usually visualized as directed

graphs to make the ﬂow of resources, tasks and time

visible. In general, different graph layout algorithms

exist (e.g., see (Eades et al., 1993; Sugiyama, 2002;

Hong et al., 1998; de Fraysseix et al., 1988)) as well

as layout approaches tailored for business process

graphs (e.g., see (Efﬁnger et al., 2009; Albrecht et al.,

2010; Diguglielmo et al., 2002; Zhao et al., 2009; Six

and Tollis, 2002)).

Orthogonally, several approaches suggest to visu-

alize business processes in 3D such as (Sch

onhage

et al., 2000; Brown and Recker, 2011; Betz et al.,

2008; Brown, 2010; Eichhorn et al., 2009). The ques-

tion to visualize processes in 2D or 3D is intensely

IVAPP 2012 - International Conference on Information Visualization Theory and Applications

586

discussed in the research community. One point of

view is that the third dimension is a possibility to en-

code further information and enables interaction with

larger business process models (Brown and Recker,

2011). For example, (Betz et al., 2008) state that a

2D representation of business processes is limited in

regard to the amount of information which can be in-

tegrated in an understandable way. Furthermore, the

authors mention that 2D representations of process in-

formation interfere each other. Another point of view

is that the third dimension has the effect to make the

visualization and interaction more difﬁcult (e.g., cer-

tain information might be hidden). For users who are

not familiar it is more difﬁcult to interpret the data

with a 3D visualization. A well-organized 2D rep-

resentation is more easily accessible and accepted by

business people (Sch

onhage et al., 2000).

Another challenge addressed in literature is the

visualization of complex business processes due the

multitude of different information such as control

ﬂows, data ﬂows, or resources contained within one

process model. Generally, it is hard to visualize all

the information effectively without introducing new

problems (e.g., cluttered or overcrowded view). Some

approaches (e.g., see (Bobrik et al., 2007; Bobrik

et al., 2006; Bobrik and Bauer, 2007; Matkovi

c et al.,

2002; Jablonski and Goetz, 2008; Polyvyanyy et al.,

2008)) propose to visualize different perspectives on

business processes for breaking down the complex-

ity of business processes and to improve the com-

prehensibility of the process structure. For example,

(Jablonski and Goetz, 2008) present a business pro-

cess visualization approach which enables to be ﬂex-

ible with respect to the different perspectives of busi-

ness processes. (Polyvyanyy et al., 2008) introduce

an approach - named Abstraction Slider - which en-

ables users to control the abstraction levels of process

models. A further approach is described by Provi-

ado (Bobrik et al., 2007; Bobrik et al., 2006; Bobrik

and Bauer, 2007) which enables different views on the

process and related data with an adapted visualization

and a customized granularity of information that re-

ﬂects interests and needs of different user roles.

Animation is a typical way to visualize how busi-

ness processes are executed (Rinderle et al., 2006)

and is used in tools such as ARIS or IBM WBI Mod-

eler. Furthermore, several research studies point out

that the usage of animations can help users to trace

changes and to understand the process ﬂow more eas-

ily (e.g., see (Burkhart and Fusco, 1996; Eichhorn

et al., 2009)). However, there is also criticism on us-

ing animation. (Beck et al., 2009), for example, point

out that the cognitive load is the major problem for an-

imations, because humans can only see a single image

and therefore it is not possible to follow all changes

in the visualization. Visually keeping track of busi-

ness process changes has been addressed only by few

approaches such as (Kabicher et al., 2011). The ques-

tion, if a static or dynamic graphical representation is

more suitable to visualize changes in data sets can not

be answered at this point, because it depends on the

type of dynamic data and on the decision which tasks

should be performed.

5 SURVEY

The primary goal of conducting a survey was to gain

more information about users’ experiences and expec-

tations.

5.1 Sample

The invitation of the online survey for participation

was sent via mailing lists to persons who had at least

basic knowledge with business process models and/or

process visualization. Fifteen persons responded to

the questionnaire. The participation was voluntary

and anonymous.

5.2 Survey Design

The design of the survey is inspired by questionnaire

guidelines, such as (Lumsden, 2005; Stone et al.,

2005; Wilson, 2007). The participants can control the

survey and have the possibility to skip questions if

s/he does not want to answer it. Additionally to an

introduction and a description about the purpose of

the questionnaire, the questions are classiﬁed into the

following categories:

• Background Questions. This category includes in-

troductory questions to identify more about the

users’ background. This information should help

us to classify users’ characteristics to get a gen-

eral picture about particular user groups. For ex-

ample the category contains questions how they

would rate their knowledge of business processes

or with which of the visualization techniques they

are familiar.

• Experience Questions. This category includes

questions to analyze users’ experiences in regard

to process visualization and change visualization.

Furthermore, the category contains questions to

ﬁnd out the experiences with visualization tools

and what they like or dislike about these tools.

The answers will give us the possibility to ﬁnd out

what works well and what works not so well.

CHANGE VISUALIZATIONS IN BUSINESS PROCESSES - Requirements Analysis

587

• Expectations Questions. The last category con-

tains questions about expectations in regard to

change representations.

5.3 Results

The results are based on quantitative and qualitative

analysis. For the responses from the open-end and

combined questions, we applied the qualitative con-

tent analysis to evaluate participants’ answers. The

ﬁndings of the survey are classiﬁed into the three

questionnaire categories listed in the previous subsec-

tion.

5.3.1 Background Questions

The ﬁndings of the survey are based on the answers

of seven experts, ﬁve semi-experts and three non-

experts. In our case experts are persons who have

a high knowledge about business processes and are

occupied with them very often and intensive. Semi-

experts describe persons who have basic knowledge

about business processes and use them only some-

times. Non-experts are persons with low knowledge

about business processes and use them rarely.

The participants stated that they would describe

their role in regard to business process management

as researcher (6 statements), analyst (3 statements),

designer (2 statements), business leader/manager (2

statements) and two persons did not deﬁne their role.

We also wanted to know how familiar they were

with different visualization approaches (e.g., graphs,

different diagram types, 3D representation, and ani-

mation). The responses showed that most participants

stated that they were very familiar with node-link rep-

resentations (see Figure 2). The responses to the ques-

tion which of the visualization techniques they pre-

ferred showed very well that graphs (rated by 20% of

the particpants) and diagramm types (especially bar

charts with 16%, pie charts with 14% and Gantt charts

with 9%) were the clear favourites. A possible rea-

son for this result could be that most of the business

process tools use usually node-link representations in

combination with different digram types and therefore

other visualization techniques (e.g., icon techniques)

are not so popular to the user.

5.3.2 Experience Questions

86.67% of the participants stated that they used

tools to visualize processes and the responses showed

a wide range of tools. Following tools were

named (in alphabetical order): Adobe Illustrator,

AdoBEN, ADONIS, ADOit, ADOlog, ADOscore,

AdoXX, ARIS Express, AristaFlow, BonitaSoft, Dia,

eduWeaver, @enterprise Reporting Component, Free-

Mind, IBM WebSphere ILOG JRules, IBM Web-

Sphere MQ Workﬂow, Intalio, Microsoft Excel, Mi-

crosoft PowerPoint, Microsoft Project, Microsoft Vi-

sio, MindMap, OpenOfﬁce Draw, Oryx, SeMFIS, Po-

seidon for UML, VisualParadigm, Yaoqiang BPMN

Editor, and YAWL. The most named tools were Mi-

crosoft Visio (8 nominations), Microsoft Excel (5

nominations), Microsoft PowerPoint (4 nominations)

and ARIS Express as well as ADONIS (3 nomina-

tions each). Most of the named tools used node-link

representations and/or different digram types such as

bar charts, Gantt charts, or pie charts. Furthermore,

the result showed that also draw tools were named

(e.g., Adobe Illustrator, Microsoft Visio, OpenOfﬁce

Draw, and Dia) which usually are not suitable to visu-

alize large processes.

Although the relevance to visualize change infor-

mation was noted by the practitioners, e.g., for shared

processes or when a process model is changed while

other instances are still alive, only 40% of the par-

ticipants stated that they already had experiences with

tools which visualized change information about pro-

cesses. The following tools were named: ADONIS

as well as Aristaﬂow (2 nominations each) and SeM-

FIS, IBM Blueworks as well as @enterprise Report-

ing Component (1 nomination each). According to

the question how the changes were visualized, two ap-

proaches were listed: (1) the usage of color to make

changes transparent in graphs and (2) the usage of ta-

bles/textual form to list process changes (4 statements

each). They stated that the change visualization was

a good possibility to analyze and to compare possible

scenarios depending of the performed modiﬁcations.

However, only half of the 40% of the participants

(who already had experience with change visualiza-

tion) stated that they had the feeling that the visualiza-

tion gave them a good support to track the changes.

They criticized that changes can not be tracked be-

tween the different versions or shared processes.

Although 53.33% of the participants stated that

they used version visualizations, most of them (75%

from the 53.33% of the participants) listed only tools

to maintain current and historical versions of ﬁles

such as source codes, web pages, and documenta-

tions. The most named tools were: Microsoft Word,

SmartGit and Apache Subversion (3 nominations).

Only ADONIS, ADOit, ADOlog as well as Process-

Wiki (1 nomination each) were stated for tools which

would support version representation for processes.

The possibility to track changes and the accept/reject

options in Microsoft Word were stated as most named

advantage to use such version visualizations (3 nomi-

nations). Furthermore they liked if changes were col-

IVAPP 2012 - International Conference on Information Visualization Theory and Applications

588

Figure 2: Familiarity of the participants with different visualization techniques (from Excellent (1) to Not Familiar (5)).

ored in version visualizations to make the changes

faster visible. However, they noted if more changes

should be visualized, the version visualizations may

overcrowd soon. In this case it would be not clear

where the changes occured and the graphical repre-

sentation could be confusing for long-running pro-

cesses with many changes (beause of a long history).

5.3.3 Expectations Questions

The participants were asked what they generally ex-

pect from a change visualization and the responses

can be divided into the following categories:

• Clear Representation (11 Statements): Partici-

pants expected that the visualization should give

them a fast, simple and clear overview about the

changes in process models as well as instances

and the changes between the different process ver-

sions. Furthermore, it was noted that it should be

avoided that the representation is overloaded with

too much information. For example, it was stated

that the visualization should provide a show/hide

function to enable which information should be

visible or slide shows of a series of pictures on the

same subject along the time line can be used to

slide the time back or forth.

• Change Information (4 Statements): Participants

stated it would be helpful to have the possibility

to not only see the different kinds of changes but

also to see additional change information such as

a short description why the business process was

changed or the name from the person who made

the change.

• Effects of Changes (3 statements): Participants ex-

pected that the graphical visualization of changes

should make effects in processes visible to see

how the changes affect the whole process and to

detect possible problems or conﬂicts.

• Version Visualization (2 Statements): Two partic-

ipants noted that they would also expect that a

change visualization should support them to com-

pare changes between different process versions.

6 REQUIREMENTS

The literature review shows us that there exist sev-

eral visualization approaches to make changes in data

transparent, but the responses of the survey indicate

that process changes are often only highlighted (e.g.,

via color) in the process graph or they are listed in tex-

tual form in practice. Moreover, the survey shows us

that change information (e.g., which person changed

what elements in the processes) is often missed. Of-

ten tools are used which are only suitable to visualize

small parts of the process and not to comprehend the

whole processes or to see the relationships between

different versions.

Based on these observations, we discuss in this

section different change visualization requirements

and give possible directions for further work.

6.1 Clear Change Representation

All changes in processes should be recorded and the

visualization should support users to get a fast and

clear view about the changes between the different

process versions. One big challenge is to visualize

changes prominently enough to draw users’ attentions

to them and that they understand the logic behind a

CHANGE VISUALIZATIONS IN BUSINESS PROCESSES - Requirements Analysis

589

process to comprehend possible effects/consequences

in the case of changes (Rinderle et al., 2006; Chen,

2005). For an effective usage of such visualizations

it is necessary to ﬁnd a user-friendly design which al-

lows users to track the changes between the different

versions of the models without being overwhelmed

with change information.

Usually, ﬁle comparison tools apply change marks

to make the changes between different versions visi-

ble. This approach can be adopted to make changes in

processes transparent. For example, visual properties

(e.g., color, size, shape, and texture) and icons can be

used to highlight process changes between different

versions. It is important that the change marks sup-

port users to see the change information quickly and

therefore visual properties should not be used as dec-

orative elements or as unnecessary graphical effects.

Not all visual properties work well for each kind of

process visualization and therefore the choice how the

changes should be visualized depends strongly on dif-

ferent aspects. For example, the usage of shapes and

textures is restricted because shapes or textures often

strongly depend on the used business process model-

ing notations. Although colors can be used to make

change information clearly visible, it is necessary to

consider that it is often insufﬁcient to code the in-

formation with colors only, because, e.g., users can

be color blind (Stone et al., 2005). Moreover, tradi-

tional or existing icons should be used and the repre-

sentation of the icons should be clear such that users

can see for which function or action the icon stands

for (Galitz, 2002).

6.2 Visibility of Relationships between

Versions

All process versions should be taken into considera-

tion not only the latest version of the process and there

should be an easy way for users to see the dependen-

cies between the different process versions. The rep-

resentation of interconnections between the process

versions makes it more comprehensible for the users

and allows to make comparisons between them.

A version graph (or version tree) is a well-known

approach to make relationships between versions

transparent (e.g., see (Diehl, 2007; Freire et al.,

2006; Ther

on et al., 2007; Gulla, 1992; Kejser and

Grønbæk, 2004)). The graphical view of the version

history as graph can be used to get a general view of

the different process versions and can make branched

and merged information visible.

In addition to speciﬁc version information (e.g.,

comments, time stamps, and names of the persons

who changed the processes), the version graph should

also enable users to compare how the processes have

changed between different versions. For example,

Figure 3 shows a concept how the version graph for

processes can be combined with the process graph to

make change information visible. The version graph

presents the versions of the process as nodes and the

relationships between the versions as edges. Delta

∆ describes the differences between subsequent ver-

sions. In the case a node is selected in the version

graph the corresponding process graph is presented

(see (a) and (c) in Figure 3). If two nodes are selected

in the version graph then the corresponding processes

are merged and the changes are highlighted (see (b)

in Figure 3).

6.3 Different Views

Only highlighting of changes is often not sufﬁcient

for users to comprehend the changed processes or to

identify further consequences. However, designing a

visual representation, which combines different infor-

mation in a single view, is limited. Displaying in-

formation about changes in multiple views simpliﬁes

the design. The different views should be linked to-

gether to support users’ understanding of the infor-

mation (e.g., selected objects in one view should also

be highlighted in corresponding views) (Green et al.,

2008; North, 2001; Roberts, 1998).

Multiple levels of abstraction are needed to ana-

lyze changes from different angles. For example, one

view can present additional change information (e.g.,

revision date, author of revision, number of changed

elements, short description about the reason for the

changes). It can be helpful for users to see each oth-

ers work (e.g., who is working on which part, and who

made what changes) so that they know whom to ask if

there is any understanding problem. Or another view

can support users to analyze effects in processes and

to see if the changed element is in conﬂict with other

elements or the planned change is not valid. Moreover

multiple views can be helpful to coordinate the above-

mentioned combination of the version graph with the

process graph with the corresponding change infor-

mation (see Figure 3).

6.4 Interaction

Although the presented visualization approaches in

Section 4.2 support different levels of interactivity,

the results of the literature review show that the

description of the different approaches concentrate

primarily on the visual representation and less on

the used interaction strategies. However interaction

strategies play an important role for analyzing change

IVAPP 2012 - International Conference on Information Visualization Theory and Applications

590

Figure 3: Combination of version graph with change information in the process graph: (a) process version is selected, (b) the

two selected processes are merged and colors are used to visualize the change information between the both processes (color

green for new elements and color red for deleted elements) and (c) subsequent version is selected.

information between different process versions. Be-

cause of the limited screen space it is only possible

to represent a small portion of information in more

detail and a visual representation alone is often not

sufﬁcient in many cases.

Especially, the visualization of change informa-

tion should be organized in a meaningful and useful

way for easy navigation and switching between the

different views. There exist several interaction strate-

gies (e.g., brushing and linking, zooming and pan-

ning, or scrolling) which can be used for analyzing

process changes. Moreover, it is necessary that users

can manipulate the visualization to decide which in-

formation should be visualized. It is important to ﬁnd

manipulation strategies, e.g., if more than two pro-

cess versions should be analyzed or for long-running

processes with many changes. The responses of our

user survey show us that the strategy from Microsoft

Word to track and manipulate changes with the help

of accept and reject options is a good possibility to

manipulate changes in documentations. This strategy

can also be applied to manipulate the change infor-

mation between different process versions. Further-

more, the visualization should provide ﬁlter functions

to enable users to decide how long change informa-

tion should be visualized in the processes. For exam-

ple, users should be able to decide if it is sufﬁcient

to visualize only the change information between the

two selected process versions or if it is necessary to

visualize also change information from the previous

versions.

7 CONCLUSIONS

The motivation of this paper was to support researcher

to identify directions for further work to bring forward

process change visualizations. In this paper, visual-

ization requirements were presented with the focus

on supporting users in comparing changes between

different process versions. However, before we dis-

cussed visualization requirements, we conducted a lit-

erature review to get an overview about the different

characteristics of changes in processes and about al-

ready existing visualization approaches. Furthermore,

we combined the literature review with a user sur-

vey to obtain additional insights about users’ experi-

ences and expectations in this ﬁeld. The responses

showed that the used visualization tools only high-

light changes in processes but they do not allow to

track changes between the different versions. In ad-

dition to clear change representation, users expected

that visualization should also make the effects of

changes in processes (e.g., to detect conﬂicts) and ad-

ditional change information (e.g., author of revision)

visible.

The identiﬁed requirements will enable possible

directions for further research. We will concentrate

to ﬁnd out which forms of presentation are best suited

for analyzing change information in processes and de-

sign solutions to make changes in processes suitable

regarding users’ needs. For example, we will investi-

gate the graphical representation of version graphs to

support the management of large process collections.

Further, we intend to reﬁne change visualizations in

regard to further aspects such as actors (e.g., person

who made the changes) and time (e.g., temporal rela-

tions). Additionally, extensive evaluations of our so-

lutions are planned.

CHANGE VISUALIZATIONS IN BUSINESS PROCESSES - Requirements Analysis

591

REFERENCES

Aguilar-Sav

en, R. S. (2004). Business process modelling:

Review and framework. International Journal of Pro-

duction Economics, 90(2):129–149.

Albrecht, B., Efﬁnger, P., Held, M., and Kaufmann, M.

(2010). An automatic layout algorithm for bpel pro-

cesses. In Proc. of the 5th International Symposium

on Software Visualization, pages 173–182. ACM.

Beck, F., Burch, M., and Diehl, S. (2009). Towards an aes-

thetic dimensions framework for dynamic graph vi-

sualisations. In Proc. of the 13th International Con-

ference Information Visualisation, pages 592–597,

Washington, DC, USA. IEEE Computer Society.

Betz, S., Eichhorn, D., Hickl, S., Klink, S., Koschmider,

A., Li, Y., Oberweis, A., and Trunko, R. (2008). 3d

representation of business process models. In Loos,

P., Nttgens, M., Turowski, K., and Werth, D., editors,

MobIS, LNI, pages 73–87. GI.

Bobrik, R. and Bauer, T. (2007). Towards conﬁgurable pro-

cess visualizations with proviado. In Proc. of the 16th

IEEE International Workshops on Enabling Technolo-

gies: Infrastructures for Collaborative Enterprises

(WETICE 2007, pages 367–369.

Bobrik, R., Bauer, T., and Reichert, M. (2006). Proviado -

personalized and conﬁgurable visualizations of busi-

ness processes. In Proc. of the 7th International Con-

ference on Electronic Commerce and Web Technolo-

gies (EC-WEB’06), Lecture Notes in Computer Sci-

ence, pages 61–71. Springer.

Bobrik, R., Reichert, M., and Bauer, T. (2007). View-based

process visualization. In Proc. of the 5th International

Conference on Business Process Management, pages

88–95. Springer.

Brown, R. A. (2010). Conceptual modelling in 3d virtual

worlds for process communication. In Proc. of the

7th Asia-Paciﬁc Conference on Conceptual Modelling

- Volume 110, APCCM ’10, pages 25–32.

Brown, R. A. and Recker, J. C. (2011). Using virtual worlds

for collaborative business process modeling. Business

Process Management Journal, 17:In Press.

Burkhart, B. J. and Fusco, M. E. (1996). Using animation

to aid process ﬂow visualization. In Proc. of the Con-

ference Companion on Human Factors in Computing

Systems: Common Ground (CHI’96), pages 21–22.

ACM.

Chen, C. (2005). Top 10 unsolved information visualization

problems. IEEE Comput. Graph. Appl., 25:12–16.

de Fraysseix, H., Pach, J., and Pollack, R. (1988). Small

sets supporting fary embeddings of planar graphs. In

Proc. of the 20th annual ACM Symposium on Theory

of Computing, pages 426–433. ACM.

Diehl, S. (2007). Visualizing the evolution of software

systems. In Software Visualization, pages 129–147.

Springer.

Diguglielmo, G., Durocher, E., Kaplan, P., Sander, G., and

Vasiliu, A. (2002). Graph layout for workﬂow appli-

cations with ilog jviews. In Proc. of the 10th Interna-

tional Symposium on Graph Drawing, pages 362–363.

Springer.

Eades, P., Lin, T., and Lin, X. (1993). Two tree drawing con-

ventions. Int. J. Comput. Geometry Appl., 3(2):133–

153.

Efﬁnger, P., Siebenhaller, M., and Kaufmann, M. (2009).

An interactive layout tool for bpmn. In Proc. of IEEE

International Conference on Commerce and Enter-

prise Computing, pages 399–406, Los Alamitos, CA,

USA. IEEE Computer Society.

Eichhorn, D., Koschmider, A., Li, Y., Sturzel, P., Ober-

weis, A., and Trunko, R. (2009). 3d support for busi-

ness process simulation. In Proc. of the 33rd Annual

IEEE International Computer Software and Applica-

tions Conference, volume 1, pages 73–80. IEEE Com-

puter Society.

Freire, J., Silva, C., Callahan, S., Santos, E., Scheidegger,

C., and Vo, H. (2006). Managing rapidly-evolving

scientiﬁc workﬂows. In Moreau, L. and Foster, I.,

editors, Provenance and Annotation of Data, volume

4145 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages

10–18. Springer.

Galitz, W. O. (2002). The Essential Guide to User Interface

Design: Introduction to GUI Design Principles and

Techniques. Wiley & Sons.

Green, T. M., Ribarsky, W., and Fisher, B. (2008). Visual

analytics for complex concepts using a human cogni-

tion model. In Proc. of the IEEE Symposium on Visual

Analytics Science and Technology (VAST 2008), pages

91–98. IEEE Computer Society.

Gulla, B. (1992). Improved maintenance support by multi-

version visualizations. In Proc. of the 8th Interna-

tional Conference on Software Maintenance (ICSM

1992), pages 376–383. IEEE Computer Society.

Hong, S.-H., Eades, P., Quigley, A., and Lee, S. H. (1998).

Drawing algorithms for series-parallel digraphs in two

and three dimensions. In Proc. of the 6th Interna-

tional Symposium on Graph Drawing, pages 198–209.

Springer.

Jablonski, S. and Goetz, M. (2008). Perspective oriented

business process visualization. In ter Hofstede, A.,

Benatallah, B., and Paik, H.-Y., editors, Business Pro-

cess Management Workshops, volume 4928 of Lecture

Notes in Computer Science, pages 144–155. Springer.

Kabicher, S., Kriglstein, S., and Rinderle-Ma, S. (2011).

Visual change tracking for business process models.

In Proc. of the 30th International Conference on Con-

ceptual Modeling (ER 2011). Springer.

Kejser, T. and Grønbæk, K. (2004). The gaia frame-

work: Version support in web based open hyperme-

dia. IADIS International Journal of WWW/Internet,

2:17–33.

Kettinger, W. J., Teng, J. T. C., and Guha, S. (1997). Busi-

ness process change: A study of methodologies, tech-

niques, and tools. MIS Quarterly, 21(1):55–80.

Lu, R. and Sadiq, S. (2007). A survey of comparative busi-

ness process modeling approaches. In Proc. of the

10th International Conference on Business Informa-

tion Systems, pages 82–94. Springer.

Lumsden, J. (2005). Guidelines for the design of online-

questionnaires. Technical Report NRC 48231, Na-

tional Research Council (of Canada).

IVAPP 2012 - International Conference on Information Visualization Theory and Applications

592

Matkovi

c, K., Hauser, H., Sainitzer, R., and Gr

oller, M. E.

(2002). Process visualization with levels of detail. In

Proc. of the IEEE Symposium on Information Visu-

alization (InfoVis’02), pages 67–70. IEEE Computer

Society.

North, C. (2001). Multiple views and tight coupling in visu-

alization: A language, taxonomy, and system. In Proc.

of the International Conference on Imaging Science,

Systems, and Technology Workshop of Fundamental

Issues in Visualization, pages 626–632. CSREA Press.

Nurcan, S. (2008). A survey on the ﬂexibility require-

ments related to business processes and modeling arti-

facts. In Proc. of the 41st Annual Hawaii International

Conference on System Sciences, pages 378–387. IEEE

Computer Society.

Nurcan, S. and Barrios, J. (2003). Enterprise knowledge and

information system modelling in an evolving environ-

ment. In Proc. of the First International Workshop on

Engineering Methods to Support Information Systems

Evolution in Conjunction with OOIS’03, pages 1–14.

Polyvyanyy, A., Smirnov, S., and Weske, M. (2008). Pro-

cess model abstraction: A slider approach. In Proc.of

the 12th International IEEE Enterprise Distributed

Object Computing Conference, pages 325–331. IEEE

Computer Society.

Rajabi, B. A. and Lee, S. P. (2010). Modeling and analysis

of change management in dynamic business process.

International Journal of Computer and Electrical En-

gineering, 2(1):181–189.

Reichert, M. and Dadam, P. (1998). Adeptﬂex – sup-

porting dynamic changes of workﬂows without losing

control. Journal of Intelligent Information Systems,

10:93–129.

Rinderle, S., Bobrik, R., Reichert, M., and Bauer, T. (2006).

Business process visualization - use cases, challenges,

solutions. In Proc. of the 8th International Conference

on Enterprise Information Systems, pages 204–211.

Rinderle, S., Reichert, M., and Dadam, P. (2004). Correct-

ness criteria for dynamic changes in workﬂow sys-

tems – a survey. Data and Knowledge Engineering,

50(1):9–34.

Roberts, J. C. (1998). On encouraging multiple views for

visualisation. In Proc. of the International Confer-

ence on Information Visualisation, pages 8–14. IEEE

Computer Society.

Schonenberg, H., Mans, R., Russell, N., Mulyar, N., and

van der Aalst, W. (2008). Process ﬂexibility: A sur-

vey of contemporary approaches. In Proc. of the 4th

International Workshop CIAO! and 4th International

Workshop EOMAS, Lecture Notes in Business Infor-

mation Processing, pages 16–30. Springer.

Sch

onhage, B., van Ballegooij, A., and Elli

ens, A. (2000).

3d gadgets for business process visualization - a case

study. In Proc. of the 5th Symposium on Virtual Real-

ity Modeling Language (Web3D-VRML), pages 131–

138. ACM.

Six, J. M. and Tollis, I. G. (2002). Automated visualization

of process diagrams. In Revised Papers from the 9th

International Symposium on Graph Drawing, pages

45–59. Springer.

Stone, D., Jarrett, C., Woodroffe, M., and Minocha, S.

(2005). User Interface Design and Evaluation. Mor-

gan Kaufmann.

Sugiyama, K. (2002). Graph drawing and applications

for software and knowledge engineers. Series on

software engineering and knowledge engineering,11.

World Scientiﬁc Publishing Company.

Ther

on, R., Gonz

alez, A., Garc

ıa, F., and Santos, P. (2007).

The use of information visualization to support soft-

ware conﬁguration management. In Baranauskas,

C., Palanque, P., Abascal, J., and Barbosa, S., edi-

tors, Human-Computer Interaction INTERACT 2007,

volume 4663 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science,

pages 317–331. Springer.

van der Aalst, W. (2001). How to handle dynamic change

and capture management information? an approach

based on generic workﬂow models. International

Journal of Computer Systems, Science and Engineer-

ing, 16(5):295–318.

van der Aalst, W. and Jablonski, S. (2000). Dealing with

workﬂow change: Identiﬁcation of issues an solu-

tions. Int’l Journal of Comp. Systems, Science and

Engineering, 15(5):267–276.

Weber, B., Reichert, M., and Rinderle-Ma, S. (2008).

Change patterns and change support features - enhanc-

ing ﬂexibility in process-aware information systems.

Data Knowl. Eng., 66:438–466.

West, T. G., Uhl, J. J., and Martinez, J. (2006). Seeing

the unseen: visualization in education. In ACM SIG-

GRAPH 2006 Educators Program. ACM.

Wilson, C. E. (2007). Designing useful and usable ques-

tionnaires: you can’t just ”throw a questionnaire to-

gether”. interactions, 14:48–63.

orzberger, R., Ehses, N., and Heer, T. (2008). Adding

support for dynamics patterns to static business pro-

cess management systems. In Proc. of the 7th Inter-

national Conference on Software Composition, pages

84–91. Springer.

Zhao, X., Han, J., and Huang, Y. (2009). An automatic lay-

out function in bpel visual modeling tool. In Proc.

of the ACIS International Conference on Software

Engineering, Artiﬁcial Intelligence, Networking, and

Parallel/Distributed Computing, pages 14–17. IEEE

Computer Society.

CHANGE VISUALIZATIONS IN BUSINESS PROCESSES - Requirements Analysis

593